ABSTRACT
Journeying to other planets is more often like return than departure. When fictional travelers head for other planets and galaxies, they do not so much leave problems of communication behind them as go back to old concerns in new forms, the inevitable return of the unexpressed (Mossop 1996: 1-27). In George Lucas’ Star Wars trilogies, an ambitious space opera spanning more than a quarter of a century of film making from Star Wars (1977) to Revenge of the Sith (2005), communication in a multilingual galaxy is both a reality to be created and a problem to be solved. Translation is not a peripheral concern but a central issue for the different characters, entities and peoples who populate the imaginary worlds of films that grossed some of the highest box-office takings worldwide ever recorded for motion pictures. In this chapter, we will explore how translation is represented in the trilogies and what these representations can tell us about how translation is called upon to deal with issues of radical otherness. The Star Wars trilogies in order of the chronological appearance of the
films begin with Star Wars (1977), also called A New Hope. This film was followed by The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). When Lucas returned to making the second Star Wars trilogy in the 1990s, he decided to make a ‘prequel,’ in other words, the action in these films would in historical terms precede events in the first three films. The first film in the prequel trilogy was The Phantom Menace (1999). This film was followed by Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005). What is notable in most of the films of the trilogies is the prominence of a character who is robot rather than human, C-3PO. C-3PO is a ‘protocol droid,’ an intelligent, self-aware robot, whose primary tasks are diplomacy and translation. When in The Return of the Jedi he is asked the question that comes to haunt all translators, ‘How many languages do you speak?,’ his response is swift, ‘I am fluent in over six million forms of communication.’ So what function does C-3PO fulfill in the narrative and how does his role as a translator or more specifically interpreter influence the attitude of other characters toward him?
